With the increasing popularity of tablet, or slate, computing devices, more content is being presented in a layout and a format that is analogous to that typically found in printed media, such as books, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers. For example, newspapers typically present printed content in a column format where a single article is distributed among multiple columns, including possibly across multiple pages. As another example, magazines typically present printed content in the same column format, but often intersperse a greater amount of graphics and other non-textual elements. Furthermore, because of the printed nature of such media, each page acts as a well defined conceptual entity, and users are well accustomed to flipping pages to access further printed content.
With the ubiquity of the Internet and the World Wide Web, however, a large amount of content is available in a fundamentally different format. More specifically, webpages typically present content in a “limitless scroll” paradigm where content is presented continuously and without page breaks as the user scrolls down the webpage. The concept of individual printed pages was superseded, on the World Wide Web, by the concept of individual webpages which, again, quite unlike a printed page, can each represent a limitless scroll.
The flexibility of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which defines most webpages on the World Wide Web, does enable webpage authors to individually, and manually, set up webpages that mimic printed media. However, such a task can be time-consuming and inefficient. For example, the webpage author must carefully select the amount of text, or other content, that is to be displayed on each webpage that is designed to mimic a printed page. Additionally, the webpage author must repeat this process for each individual webpage, and each time the content changes.